Fabric painting – Page 4 – The Accidental Embroiderer

The Aviary (continued)

11 April 2011MiaFabric painting / Pieced embroideryLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago (on the 23rd of March) I posted the picture of a stitch-out of an aviary design inspired indirectly by one of my mother’s drawings. The embroidery consisted of small squares assembled into a small panel, and the whole panel was only about the size of an A4 piece of paper. Some of the individual squares were very small indeed – the smallest were only an inch square. I liked the aviary idea but began to be irritated by the smallness of the designs – there was no room to add intricate detailing to the individual birds, and I thought that such colourful birds deserved a little more thought and a little more detailing.

So I doubled the size of each bird and redigitised each one as an appliqué, and added a lot more detail to each one. As my machine is now repaired (thanks to the skill and kind attentions of Lubka, at David Drummond) I finally managed to stitch all the squares out, using my own painted fabric both for the background and the appliquéd birds. When it was assembled, the finished panel was about 28 inches tall, and certainly gave enough scope for intricate detailing on the individual birds.

The aviary panel, laid out but not yet stitched

But somehow it still didn’t work. It was decorative enough but it looked a bit flat and boring. The birds needed even more detail and more vitality So after some thought I started to use acrylic paints to add more character to each bird, and this did a lot to add to the interest of the whole thing. Each bird now has its own character and a lot more energy than the original plain appliquees. I’m still not finished with the painting, but here are some pictures of a couple of the birds before and after the over-painting.

Green and yellow birds, before and after over-painting

I have to admit that seen close-up, they do look a bit crude. However when they're all assembled into the final panel and seen from a few feet away, I think they'll do a lot better. You have to exaggerate some things to make them look better when seen from a distance.

Now I just have to finish adding the details to the remaining birds and then see if I can manage to stitch the whole thing together

Winter tree

9 March 2011MiaFabric painting / New approaches / Pieced embroideryLeave a comment

Still looking at some old things – here’s an abstraction of a leafless tree, based on some drawings I made last autumn. It’s another attempt at using piecing to make a large panel from small, individual embroidered squares

Usually the problem with these panels is that it’s difficult to put together the small pieces to make a coherent whole, because the lines never quite match up as they cross from one small piece to the next. So I thought I’d make a virtue out of necessity, and break up the image of the tree into very different views of the branches and trunks. It was something like some of the ideas of the French Cubists, of the early 20^th century who said they wanted to look at many different views of the same object all at once. Not that I’m a cubist, but in a small way I could see what they were talking about, so in this panel each square is a slightly different view of part of the whole tree. The little squares were stitched onto painted fabric and then stitched together by Cherri Kincaid’s expert hands.

Winter tree panel, assembled by Cherri Kincaid

It sort of works, but I think I should have used darker thread for the twigs and branches. The painted fabric is perhaps a little too intrusive, and really the tree should stand out a little more. But as this is more art than straightforward embroidery, I think I should be able to get away with touching up the image a little with more contrasting colours. I’ll have to think about it

Backgrounds

3 December 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

I’m really enjoying our painting group, run by artist Frances Crawford, who lives locally (http://www.francescrawfordart.com/). It’s not easy for me to make the change from drawing to painting, and from design to more serious art, but it’s definitely going to be worth making the effort.

One thing that Frances has been emphasizing is the use of background in compositions. “Background” is a difficult concept to carry over to embroidery, where the design is usually composed in isolation, and whatever background there might be is left to the person who stitches it out. If there is a background at all, it’s often just a series of simple stitched lines, like the fishes I posted on 5 November, or this bird

The only background is an area of simple contour lines

So I’ve been thinking about the different backgrounds you might have for an embroidered image. You could paint a background specifically for a particular design, like this one.

Bird embroidered on a piece of fabric painted to suit the design

Or you could incorporate some embroidery on a painted background, to draw the background and the main image together.

The background to these fish is a combination of embroidery and painted fabric

But the best way is to design the background and the main object together, like these two animals from a series I did a while back, inspired by the Waterhouse terra-cotta animals on London's Natural History Museum. Of course the problem here is that not all designs are suitable for this treatment, and it does perhaps restrict the use of the design. But it makes the design richer and more attractive to the eye, and it’s something that I will be working with in the future

The background of foliage was designed around the animals and is an integral part of the composition

Three fishes

5 November 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

At the moment I’m getting seriously involved with using fabric painting in embroidery. I’ve tried using painted fabric for applique and for backgrounds to appliqué, but I’ve also started painting designs after they’ve been embroidered. Here is an appliqué of three fishes, as it came off the embroidery machine

Three simple appliquéd fishes

Then I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours playing around embellishing the simple design with acrylic paints.

Three slightly overdone fishes

I would be the first to admit that I overdid the painting a bit, and that in this case less might well be more, but the technique works very well. The acrylics can be used on the thread as well as on the fabric, and they’re really easy to work with. And if I want to try something different I just have to stitch out the fish again and I can start the whole thing again from the beginning

Yet more fabric painting

15 October 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

The first painted fabric I used was to appliqué on a background, but of course you could also use painted fabric for the background to the applique. Here’s a blurry blue-green piece which I thought might work as a background for a jumping tree-frog

Tree-frog embroidered and appliqueed on a piece of painted fabric

I’ve also realised that you don’t need to use new quilting fabric to paint on – you can recycle old cottons, linens etc., and even prints and dark-coloured fabric can be given new interest with colours and patterns

It’s also occurred to me that I only need to use fabric paint if the embroidery is to be washed – if it’s for display only there is no reason I couldn’t use artists’ colours, like water colours, caseins, gouache or even oils. And recently I’ve discovered that acrylic paints (which I’ve never used before) make excellent fabric paints. They’re very easy to work with, they can give you all kinds of different effect and once dried are pretty well unremovable from fabric, so from now on I think I‘ll concentrate on the acrylics. I’m working on some of these painted designs now and will have them up here before long

More painted fabric and more fish

24 September 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

The painted fabric was just what I’d wanted for the green flatfish, so I did a few more fish designs to stitch with painted fabric. It’s true that you can’t see very much of the fabric on these because there’s a lot of overstitching, but I didn’t care about seeing the details of the fabric– what was important was the colour, and it was great to be able to get just the colour that I wanted

Just the right colours for applique

17 September 2010MiaFabric painting1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I’ve done designs entirely in embroidery. I’ve come to prefer appliqué for many things, because the fabric adds a lot of extra qualities to the design. Apart from the technical advantages (for example, you don’t need to use large areas of embroidery, which can buckle) you can use a huge range of printed and textured fabrics which when combined with embroidery can give intriguing depths of detail to designs. And the flat matte textures of quilting fabric combines well with shiny embroidery thread.

Because of all the appliqué I do, I’ve assembled a good collection of fabrics to choose from. However even with a wide choice of colours and textures on hand I never seem to have exactly the right colours for some designs, which is very frustrating, not to say expensive, as I used to buy a lot of fabric on-line in the forlorn hope of finding something that was exactly the colour and pattern I wanted

However one day inspiration struck – there was no reason I couldn’t paint my own fabric, and get just the colours I wanted. So I ordered some bottles of fabric paint from the internet, and bought a couple of metres of plain white quilting fabric. When the paints arrived they were a great disappointment – the colours were crude and brash, like children’s poster paints and not at all the colours that I wanted.

The colours of the fabric paints were pretty crude

But I dredged from my memory the rules of pigment mixing and after a bit of experimentation I managed to get pretty much the colours I wanted. There was a lot to learn about painting on fabric – for example the fabric can absorb a lot of water, which blurs the brush strokes, and everything dries a lot lighter than you’ve painted it. But I did manage to make some samples of painted fabric, and used some of it on a fish I’d just drawn

Appliqueed fish with customised fabric colours

And finally, just to give another side of life in the Highlands

The Grampian Highlands in late summer